What can you hear if you send a stethoscope into space?

One of the most wonderful results of the pursuit of science is the moment when two seemingly unrelated paths intersect – and a new application of technology is born.

When 3M’s Craig Oster and his team developed an innovative stethoscope that could close the distance between remote patients and medical health professionals, the idea that it could be sent into Earth’s orbit never crossed their minds.

Telemedicine to the extreme

Specifically, JAXA wanted to test whether an astronaut in space could perform an accurate stethoscope self-diagnosis in the low-gravity, noisy space station environment – and whether the data collected by the stethoscope could also be analysed on Earth by a specialist.

“An astronauts get further and further away from Earth, they won’t be able to simply make the trip back when there’s a problem. (..) that means it’s going to be necessary for astronauts to maintain their health on their own,” says Dr. Shin Yamada, Senior Research Engineer, Space Missions Division, JAXA.

The stethoscope system uses two of the scopes, which communicate with one another via a Bluetooth® connection and special software.

The first scope picks up the patient’s heart and other body sounds (while cancelling out distracting ambient noise) and then transmits the sound over a secure, encrypted digital signal (in real time) to the other scope, whether it’s across the city, the world – or – even in space.

Heartbeat to ground control

In ground control, a doctor listened to the orbiting astronaut’s heartbeat, and it sounded exactly the same as if they had met in person.

The experiment was a success and signaled one more step towards helping to remove one of the barriers to future space exploration.